No, you’re not the one particular person spending an excessive amount of time on Netflix. The typical Netflix consumer spent 16 days streaming content material from January to June this 12 months, based on new information launched by the streaming service.
After two years of customers and the press counting on Netflix’s High 10 lists and Nielsen information to find out Netflix’s most watched content material, the corporate simply opened the floodgates to a wealth of knowledge that can give extra perception into how viewers use the streaming service. On Tuesday, it dropped a dataset of 18,000 reveals and films (which make up 99% of its catalog), itemizing what number of hours of viewership they every amassed within the first six months of 2023. And it plans to proceed releasing this data each six months.
Ginny & Georgia was one of many high performing collection throughout the January to June interval, with almost 1 billion hours watched, the equal of 110,410 years. Different high performers have been The Night time Agent and Fits, with a respective 93,000 and 68,000 years-worth of hours seen.
“This is the actual data we use to run the business,” co-CEO Ted Sarandos mentioned in a press briefing on Tuesday. Altogether, Netflix’s 238.4 million subscribers (as of June 30) spent almost 100 billion hours watching Netflix over the six-month interval.
All through Netflix’s existence, “The one constant is that people are asking for more viewing information,” Sarandos mentioned. By not offering it, the corporate took strain off creators to supply breakout hits, however it additionally unintentionally constructed an environment of distrust that the corporate is now seeking to restore, he mentioned. The announcement follows months of negotiations with labor unions representing Hollywood writers and actors, during which the unions demanded greater transparency from studios.
Netflix is publishing the uncooked information within the identify of such transparency, which “creates a better environment for the [writers’ and actors’] guilds, for us, for the producers, and for the press,” based on Sarandos. Whereas advertisers might find this data useful in making choices on how one can spend their budgets, Netflix will proceed to make use of third-party information to find out the price of advertisements.
However the information, whereas informative, doesn’t give a complete image of the corporate. Because it has set six-month parameters, it isn’t an goal gauge of recognition. Wednesday, for instance, premiered in November whereas the hours seen metric begins in January. The present ranks decrease than Season 2 of Ginny & Georgia, which launched in early January and advantages from its early watchers being included within the metric. Netflix additionally has no plans to interrupt down the info into month-by-month or country-level lists, Sarandos mentioned, as a result of that may supply intelligence to its opponents.
Different streaming companies have largely adopted Netflix’s instance in guarding title-level viewership information, so Netflix’s transfer may lead others to comply with go well with. “It will be up to them,” Sarandos mentioned, including that opponents are in a unique part of the streaming enterprise and that 10 years in the past, Netflix thought in a different way about sharing information as effectively.
